Ask Carrie: How do you get your kids to sleep?

It’s nearly impossible to have friends with small children and not talk about sleep – how much your kids got the night before (and maybe more importantly, how much you got); what time they went to bed; what time they woke up; if they woke up during the night, and if so, the reason(s) why.  I usually hear things like this:

“Well, I put him down at 8, but he didn’t fall asleep until almost 8:30.  Then he got up around 8 this morning.”

Or, “The girls are usually asleep by 7:30 because I have to wake them up at 7 to get ready for school.”

Or even, “You know, he was so exhausted he fell asleep in his high chair at 6:30.  We put him in his crib and he didn’t wake up until 7 the next morning.”

WHAT?  Are my children being held hostage by some sort of invisible sleep monster?    I realize all children are different, but I can count on one hand the number of times my children have let me sleep past 7.   I don’t have nearly enough digits to count the mornings I was up with the sun, pouring milk at 5:30 and thinking of nothing but getting back into bed and sleeping until 9.

That said, having a couple of early risers isn’t all that bad.  Our main problem, you see, is bedtime.   No one wants to go to sleep at a decent hour around here.  As I write this, it’s almost 9:00 and neither Lilly nor Reid is asleep yet.  (I put them in bed at 7:30.)

I’ve read all sorts of articles on this over the past few years.  They all pretty much say the same thing – establish a nightly routine (dinner, bath, books, brushing teeth, bed – or something along those lines) and stick to it.  Children like schedules, apparently, and will learn to go to sleep if the routine is followed consistenly.

Right.

Tonight, they ate dinner.  They took baths.  We all read books, and then they brushed their teeth.  A nice round of hugs, kisses, “I love you”s, and the like followed.   (We do this just about every night, by the way. It’s not a recent development.)

Now, at 8:45, Reid is doing everything but flips and cartwheels in his crib.  Ten minutes ago, I stuck my head in there because he was yelling for me, and he popped up and said, “HI MAMA!  HI!”   A couple of minutes later I heard Lilly.  This time, she wanted to ask me if there are any sharks under her bed. (Some kids worry about monsters; mine worries about sharks and dinosaurs.)    As I reassured her that I’d checked under her bed and she was shark-free, I heard Reid yell, “MAMA!  MAMA!  I WANT MILK!”  Well, of course he did.  He’d been doing crib aerobics for a good hour.

We follow other advice, too.  We limit TV before bed.  We don’t eat a bunch of candy or other sugary foods when it’s getting close to bedtime (or any other time, though I think Reid would live on lollipops - “pop-pops” - if I let him).  We also don’t put Jolt cola in Reid’s sippy cup, though I’m starting to think someone is spiking our 2% milk with something similar.  Some days we even walk to the park (over half a mile), play for a good long while, and then walk home – uphill.   Every time we do this, I think to myself on the way home, “Okay, they HAVE to be exhausted.  They’ll pass out after they take baths.”    And just about every time, I am dead wrong.

My niece, who will be 5 months old next week, sleeps better (ie, longer) than her 2- and 4-year-old cousins.   I tell my sister all the time that I’m sending my two over to stay with her a few days, and when they start sleeping like Mae, she can send them on back home.

I’d keep going, but it’s after 10 and I just heard my name again.